We the People of the United States…Establish Justice

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021.

Yesenia Montilla is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body published by Four Way Books in 2022 was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney.  She’s a queer woman of color, and the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India. Sunu lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House in 2023. Sunu’s work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Sunu is currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward. She is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the Washington Blade’s Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love.  Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and her MFA in Poetry from Queens College/The City University of New York. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her collection, My Dear Comrades, alongside the book’s fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.